


Heartless

by GuenVanHelsing



Category: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, DO NOT READ if you do not like sad things, Loss of Parent(s), Mostly hurt, Pre-Season/Series 01, The Priest Brothers Theory, Very little dialogue, a lot of time skips, blink and you miss it Drummerwolf, earning my angst goblin squad badge i guess, hurt/some comfort, then wiggles into somewhere somewhat in canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-26
Updated: 2018-02-26
Packaged: 2019-03-24 05:08:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13804077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GuenVanHelsing/pseuds/GuenVanHelsing
Summary: Martin had never meant to hurt him. Not like this.





	Heartless

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Tella_Tale](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tella_Tale/gifts).



> based on [this post](http://shut-up-math.tumblr.com/post/171284887225/princessparadoxical) by [shut-up-math](http://shut-up-math.tumblr.com/). Probably going to hell in a handbasket but here’s some sad fic for you, lovely <3

_ “You know, when we feed off other weirdos like us, it don't hurt 'em, but normal people? It can go very, very wrong.” _

 

Everything is connected. That was the one rule of the Universe that Martin could always trust — even when it was tiny shit that didn’t make sense, sometimes it did later, and sometimes it didn’t, but it was always connected — and Martin hated it, sometimes. Hated the pull, the  _ shove _ , of some greater force directing him places he didn’t want to go. 

He needed to have some semblance of control. He didn’t have to be the one calling the shots, but he needed to know that the one who was would keep his brothers’ wellbeing at heart, first and foremost. That desire to keep them safe had grown to include their Drummer and the Beast, and Martin was worn thin keeping track of them and  _ worrying _ . It reminded him too much of the time before Blackwing, when he had another family — one that he hadn’t worried about enough to keep from losing. 

If he could go back in time and shake some sense into his younger self, he would. 

Maybe if he hadn’t made so many terrible choices, it wouldn’t have turned out this way.

 

—

 

Their mom had been sick for a long time. Never enough that she needed the hospital, that’s what she told them, but enough that she was always tired, always almost as pale as her platinum hair, always smiling a little too sadly. Martin and Oz always did their best to cheer her up, to draw her crappy pictures she would inevitably tape to the fridge beside the stellar report cards from school that they struggled to keep but stayed up late most nights to study just so they could scrape by with an A-, because she always said how proud of them she was whenever she saw those rows of A’s. 

_ My strong, smart boys, _ she would say, and their dad would smile and kiss her cheek, until the day he didn’t come back from work. 

Martin had been fourteen, and Osmund fifteen. The brothers had come home from school, wild with the energy of having aced a test each, respectively, and their enthusiasm was checked at the door when they heard muffled sobs coming from further inside the house. 

They found their mother in the living room, holding their father’s favorite baseball cap. She had tried to smile at them, but after that morning’s sunny pancake breakfast, they never saw her really smile again. Not really. Not when her heart had gone to the factory for a regular day’s work, and had never made it home. Had barely made it around the block to the first street light, where a drunk driver T-boned his car with an F150 truck. 

Martin never forgot the truck, because he had seen the photos of it on the news — the tiny green Volkswagen crushed into a lampost, and the big blue truck with barely a scratch on it.

The drunk driver survived, and was sent to jail.

Their father didn’t make it to the ambulance. 

After that day, Martin and Oz had done even more. They had worked harder in their classes, dropped all extracurricular activities, and secured pizza delivery jobs at a local hole-in-the-wall joint that didn’t care that they were obviously underage no matter what the fake IDs Oz had procured for them said. It was all local deliveries, anyway, and they were damn fast on their rickety bikes that they had never been able to afford to replace, and the tips they raked in more than covered the rent. Their mom’s transcribing job brought in a little money, but not enough to cover rent  _ and _ food,  _ and _ medicine for their mom when she felt worse some days. 

Some days it felt like Martin was drowning under the weight of her sadness, like the depths of her agony would drag him under and never let him go. Like the emotions were real enough to strangle him. 

Those emotions made him feel empty. As if there was some hunger in him, some desire to take away her pain — one he couldn’t fulfill. 

She cried for an hour the first time they showed her the money they had made, pooled together into an old tin box, and had hugged them tight and told them how much she loved them. 

They made it like this for four months, until the snow got too deep for bikes and they had to run through the snow with scarves wrapped around their noses and bulky delivery bags knocking at their hips, until the short trip from their house to the office wore out their mother so much that she barely ate dinner before falling exhausted into bed. She got paler, and skinnier, and sadder, her blue eyes set deep in her skull, and her bright yellow sundress was the only vibrancy left in her. 

She didn’t get up one morning. 

Oz went in to check on her, long after fixing omelettes for himself and Martin, and one for the mother made special since she liked vegetables in it and they didn’t, and Oz came out of the room paler than his sandy blond hair. 

Martin went in, looked at her. There was no sadness left in her, but there was also nothing else there, either. He breathed in deeply, and could only taste emptiness and death. 

He left the room, and called the hospital. 

Then it was a tangled mess of police and paramedics and social workers, all of whom meant well but none of whom could understand that they needed their mom. They needed her to be okay and to smile when they made her breakfast, to wake up early and bake them a cake on their birthdays, they needed her to be  _ there _ . 

Not zipped into a body bag and taken away like so much garbage. 

_ It’ll be okay, _ the social worker had said.  _ We have a nice foster family who will be happy to take you in. _

Martin and Oz had shared a look over the bags they’d been forced to pack — they couldn’t exactly tell the police that they had been the ones paying the rent for the past few months — and Martin had held his brother’s hand as they had walked out of their childhood home for the last time. 

They made it three weeks in their new house — not a home, just a place where they could sleep and leave their stuff, where the foster parents tried to be supportive but were just suffocating them, where the foster family’s kids were younger and didn’t understand why they suddenly had two tall, lanky strangers living in their house. 

_ You could pass as twins, _ the foster mom had said, after giving them matching black t-shirts with little decorative lines in grey.  _ With that pale hair and those cute faces. You’re both the same height, aren’t you? _

They were growing fast, already taller than their foster dad at 5’9”, and would likely be closer to 6’ when they stopped. They still did their homework together sprawled on a single bed — usually Oz’s, since he actually made it in the mornings, unlike Martin’s mass of blankets that somewhat resembled a bed — and Martin still worked through algebra problems with Oz, and Oz explained the weirder parts of chemistry to Martin when the formulas and reactions got too far over his head. 

Oz still cried when he saw a squirrel squished in the road, or whenever sad commercials played on the television, and Martin would bump his shoulder against his brother’s and sit closer to him when he could. He could taste the same saltwater sea of sadness that had drowned their mother lapping at his brother’s shores, and he didn’t want to see his brother succumb to its call. 

But it was at the end of the third week, after the scent of Oz’s sadness — so much like cinnamon and maple sugar and too much salt all at once — and the foster family’s trepidation — spicy and sharp like the Asian food their dad had brought home for them once, that burned their tongues and throats and had Oz guzzling milk straight from the jug for a straight minute — had reached new levels of stressful, Martin had herded Oz out the door and set them on a path to the park. Anything to get them out of the house, which just trapped all the overpowering smells and circulated them like a ceiling fan and made them  _ worse _ . 

And at least outside, the sad ocean smell from Oz wasn’t so bad. He even perked up a bit when he saw that Martin had ‘borrowed’ the aluminum baseball bat from the hall closet — the one their foster dad kept “in case of emergencies” — and had somehow found a real baseball, not one of the old tennis balls they usually had to steal from the dog, which were always covered in dog drool. No one was in the batting cage so they ran for it, throwing the catch on the door and glaring at another group of teens walking their way until they turned away. 

“I miss her,” said Oz, and sent the ball flying across the batting cage to bounce off the chain link fence, rolling a few feet before Martin could race across the pavement to grab it — it was technically a basketball pen, but it worked just as well as a batting cage, and it was safer than paying for smashed windows. “Her and dad, but I really miss her.” 

“Yeah,” said Martin, and threw the ball again, harder this time. “I miss them, too.” 

“It hurts so  _ much,”  _ said Oz, tossing the bat to Martin after the third swing and running to grab the ball, winding up for a pitch as Martin curled his fingers around the bat. “You’re so calm and I don’t know how you do it. I’ll be sitting in class, listening to that guy drone on about history, an’ I want to  _ scream _ . I want to throw a book through the window and kick down the door and ride our bikes until we reach  _ Canada, _ or some shit.” 

“Language,” muttered Martin, and missed the first pitch, which at least earned him a laugh from his brother — well worth the embarrassment. 

He got the next hit, hard enough that it put a dent in the chain link, and Oz crowed and smacked his shoulder, the ocean smell slowly being overpowered by baking bread — Martin missed Oz’s homemade bread — and they played for a whole two hours until their shoulders and arms were sore and the grumbling gang of teens got a little too flinty-eyed and smelled like trouble. 

“We should go,” said Oz, snatching up the ball that had rolled into the far corner after Martin’s last swing had sent it flying a little too hard into the wall — again. “Gotta share the park, right?” 

“Yeah,” said Martin, although he was burning, itching,  _ aching _ to swing the bat again and again and again, to see something  _ crumple.  _ Anything to take away the pain of seeing his brother’s hurt when he could do nothing. 

“Hey,” said one of the teens, smaller than they were but full of a bright burning anger that Martin could practically  _ see, _ blazing around him in bright blue that sparked like electricity, and Martin wanted to taste it. 

He wanted to taste that anger, that irritation, that  _ rage. _

Martin stumbled, bumping into Oz, who shot him a concerned look before unlocking the cage door. “We ain’t lookin’ for trouble,” said Oz, his accent a little more pronounced than usual, and if Martin had been a dog he would’ve felt his hackles rise. 

“Well, you found some,” said the kid, and his larger, burlier buddy stepped forward with something different in his eyes. 

Martin saw the bulky fist rise, saw the glint of knuckledusters on the approaching attack, and shoved Oz out of the way. His own attempted avoidance of the attack left him merely being clipped by the blow, a stinging hit across his face that sent his glasses flying, and he swore loudly as the world went fuzzy. 

“Jesus, man, you weren’t supposed to hit the kid with  _ glasses,” _ said the skinny kid as Martin regained his balance, his grip tightening on the baseball bat. That fizzing, bubbling energy was  _ right there, _ so close he could almost  _ taste _ it, and he flinched when a hand rested on his arm. 

“Hey,” said Oz, close enough that Martin could make out the colour of his hair and the familiar shape of his face. “How ‘bout we don’t hit anybody, and everyone goes home happy?” 

“Nah, don’t think so,” said the skinny kid. “You two dickwads have been hogging the cage for hours, and it’s park law that it’s ours after any thirty minutes. Didn’t you get the memo?” 

“Oh, man, I know those two,” said the third kind, sort of bland looking — as far as Martin could see, anyway — and smelling of something close to mashed potatoes, “it’s those orphan kids who transferred in to school. They prolly didn’t hear that we’re in charge ‘round here.” 

“What did you call us?” said Martin, low and dangerous, and he could taste their derision, their amusement. Could taste the fear that one had of being caught, one who had lingered near the back and tasted like the flight of a panicked deer. His stomach growled, the frozen waffles from that morning suddenly a distant memory, and Oz’s fingers tightened on his arm. 

“Think we oughtta teach these boys a lesson,” said the kid with the knuckledusters, his voice squeakier than Martin had been expecting. 

“Guys, there’s no need for a fi—” began Oz, then yelped as Martin shoved him again, this time out of the path of the skinny kid’s pocketknife — a long-bladed, wicked-looking thing. Martin swung the bat, hard, and the skinny kid fell back with a howl as he dropped his knife, cradling his injured wrist, and Martin had only a brief moment to revel in his victory before the burly kid caught him by the throat and threw him to the ground. 

“ _ Martin!” _ yelled Oz, too far away for Martin to place —  _ somewhere to his left, he could smell the salty sweetness of his brother’s fear _ — and Martin coughed, trying to breathe through the tight grip around his neck as he struggled, and he inhaled deeply. 

_ — boiling, spicy aggravation with the promise of contemptuous disgust, all wrapped up in a spicy burrito of creeping dread that turned into outright fear as he took and he took and he took  _ —

“What the fuck did you  _ do _ to him?” yelled the skinny kid, dragging the burly kid off of Martin with the help of two of the others, all of whom smelled of unease and outright panic. 

And damn, did it smell good. 

“Martin?” said Oz, his voice breaking, and Martin scrambled to his feet, snatching up the fallen bat and stumbling once as he nearly tripped over his own feet to get to his brother, who gripped his arm and shoved a plastic object into his hand — Martin shoved his glasses back onto his nose and blinked, eyes watering at the sudden readjustment, and he could see the worry and fear written as clearly on his brother’s face as he could taste it on the air. 

“Time to go,” said Martin, and they ran, leaving the teens to gather up their groaning, listless buddy. He felt better than he had in weeks, better than he had since before their father died, before it felt like all his energy had started to be sucked into caring for their mom and being emotional support for Oz. He felt  _ invigorated.  _ Like he could take on the world, and win. 

“What the hell was that?” Oz hissed, shocking him from his euphoria-induced distraction, and Martin smiled wildly at him. 

“Felt good,” he said. “Felt  _ really _ good to knock him on his ass.” 

“Martin,” said Oz, his eyes darting to the side before focusing back on his brother, “you just did something impossible.  _ Scientifically _ impossible.” 

“What do you mean?” said Martin, and swore under his breath, realizing that despite the bat in his hands, the ball had been left behind. It had been a good, solid ball, too. “I didn’ do much of anything.” 

“It looked like you sucked his soul right out of him,” said Oz, and Martin stopped dead, the wild energy coursing through his veins making him feel jittery rather than giddy.

“His  _ soul?” _ said Martin. “No, Oz. It was more like… like all his anger. And it tasted  _ so good, _ Oz. Better’n Cat’s pizza.” The pizza parlour they had delivered for had sold good pizza, and the owner would sometimes let them take unclaimed leftovers home. Those had been the days. But this weird new trick he had — that energy he had pulled from the boy — he didn’t understand it. All he knew is that he didn’t feel like his bones were about to pull themselves apart with weariness, and he felt full for the first time since eating Oz’s omelette all those weeks ago. 

“You ate his  _ emotions?” _ said Oz, then shushed him as they drew close to their foster family’s house. Martin hid the bat back in the closet and Oz cleaned the cut on Martin’s face enough that they could write it off as an accident rather than a fight — it miraculously hadn’t bruised, and was hardly noticeable after a day. 

They didn’t talk about the day at the park right away — too busy with homework and playing nice to the foster family and surreptitiously looking for jobs that would hire not-quite-legal teens without being too skeevy — not for another week. 

Martin had been experimenting, taking long walks around town long after his brother and the foster family had gone to sleep. He wasn’t so tired these days, that weird energy keeping him going even as his appetite for regular food lessened — he ate at mealtimes to keep the family and Oz from worrying, but he took smaller portions and quit eating snacks intermittently throughout the day. 

It was on those nightly walks that he tested his new power — the ability to smell other people’s emotions, and  _ eat _ them. It took a lot of practice, and a lot of excuses to avoid trouble when the people he followed got too suspicious, but he knew which flavors were  _ good _ and which weren’t worth taking, and he knew how to take just enough to sate his hunger without leaving his… victims…? drained and exhausted. He had overdone it a few times, but after seeing the same folks walking around fine a few days later, he just resolved never to take that much from someone all at once again. 

It was one night, though, almost to the end of the school year, five months after they had come to the town, they were informed that they would be housed with another foster family the following week. Not for any fault with them — the foster family they had been staying with was moving unexpectedly to follow a job offer for the mother, and they couldn’t afford to take two extra mouths with them. 

Martin sat with Oz in their room that night, and he could taste his brother’s sadness — the overwhelming waves crashing relentlessly against him, and he bumped his shoulder to his brother’s. “Hey,” he said. 

“Hey,” muttered Oz, and didn’t look at him, his gaze fixed on the opposite wall, by the poster of the Ramones Oz had begged their foster mom to let them tack to the wall. 

“I can take it,” said Martin, and Oz still didn’t look at him, fingers curled into the blanket crumpled on his lap. “Oz, I can take all of it. All those shitty emotions. You don’t have to hurt anymore.” 

“I don’t know, Martin,” said Oz, sinking down a bit beside him, until his head barely topped Martin’s shoulder. “I don’t want you to feel like this, too.” 

Martin sank down next to him with a sigh. “I already do,” he said quietly. “And I don’t know how else to help you.” 

Oz managed a smile, but it faded quickly. “I just want it to stop hurting, you know?” he said. “Just when I think I’ve gotten over how bad it feels, how much I  _ miss _ them, it just… hits me again. Like getting the news all over again, and it hurts. It really fucking hurts. And don’t talk to me about  _ language _ ,” he said, sticking a finger in Martin’s face, but he managed another smile when Martin bit at him playfully and he drew his finger away. “If you could take away even a fraction of how much this hurts, I’d… I don’t know. Let you have first pick of the bed for the new foster house.” That made Martin laugh, but his joviality faded with Oz’s as the sadness in his brother threatened to swamp them both. “Just do it. Eat it. Or whatever it is you do with it.  _ Just make it stop hurting, Martin.”  _

“Okay,” said Martin, and sat up, leaning over his brother and resting his forehead against Oz’s. 

Martin breathed in. 

—  _ IT WAS TOO MUCH there was so much sadness Oz was drowning in it all the tears and pain and heartbreak that was saltier than any ocean, saltier than the packaged ramen they had eaten once and never eaten plain again, saltier than the time Martin had opened his mouth underwater and would have drowned if Oz hadn’t pulled him out, but there was no Oz to rescue him now, Oz was the ocean, and Martin was drowning, he couldn’t take enough of the unending grief, so he took and he took until he felt like he couldn’t take another swallow, until there was nothing left and _ —

Martin opened his eyes and lunged from the bed, his entire body trembling with a feeling of  _ too much, _ and he gasped for breath as he turned, eyes wide as he stared at the other boy, still on the bed. 

Oz stared blankly at the wall, then sat up, slowly. “Huh,” he said, but there was no inflection in his voice, none of the spark of  _ joy life brother _ that Martin was so familiar with. Martin breathed in deeper, desperately tasting for any of the ocean or the baking bread, but there was nothing. Barely even the taste of their mother’s sweet iced tea, something that only Oz had ever perfected making even close to what she had made. 

“Oz?” he said quietly, and a stranger looked back at him from the bed with dead eyes. 

Oz was never quite the same after that. His accent got stronger, and he got crueler — he no longer cried at the drop of a hat, no longer showed an empathy to anyone, barely even to his brother. Sometimes he would act like he had before — caring and sweet and thoughtful, the Oz that Martin remembered — but Martin knew it was an act, could smell the insincerity on every honeyed word falling from his brother’s mouth. 

They survived the second foster home — despite the screaming kids and the absent-minded foster parents who sometimes forgot to feed their own kids let alone the tall blond boys who had entered their home — and Martin had found a job fixing cars at a local garage, hoping to make some money and get them their own place. Oz had applied for a government job, something he swore to Martin was safe and wouldn’t involve getting shot at, and the day he came back to their tiny shared room with his acceptance letter was the first time in months that Martin had seen genuine emotion from his brother. 

“It’s called Blackwing,” said Oz, and Martin edged away from him on the bed, away from the paper in Oz’s hand that smelled  _ bad. _ Not a real smell — he could tell the difference between a cooking steak and the smell of someone’s terror now, just the tiniest hint of difference in the spices — but every fibre of his being was telling him to get himself and Oz as far away from that paper and everything that came with it. 

“You sure about this?” said Martin, because he wasn’t. Not in the slightest. The salary would be good, enough for them to afford a down payment on their own apartment, and with Oz squeaking past his eighteenth birthday, they could finally slip free of the foster system and make their own way. 

But Martin wasn’t sure this was a price they should pay. 

“I’m sure,” said Oz, and there was something strange in his eyes when he smiled at Martin. “Trust me. They’ve even got a job for you, if you want it, and it pays a hell of a lot better than the garage does. So whaddaya say, Martin? Think we can finally spread our wings and make something of ourselves?” 

Martin hesitated, and Oz rested a hand on his shoulder, squeezing lightly, and for the first time the gesture gave Martin no comfort. 

“Trust me,” said Oz again. “Brothers gotta stick together, don’t they?” 

“Yeah,” said Martin. Brothers stuck together. That was their one law, and he would stick to it. 

He stuck to that law until they arrived at Blackwing and Oz stepped away from him, as men in white suits grabbed his arms and dragged him down the hall, as men with guns welcomed his brother, as Oz didn’t bother to spare him a glance as they dragged Martin out of sight. 

Martin howled, and raged, and tore what little emotion he could from the men holding him down, and struggled and bit and fought until they sprayed an awful white foam at him and he lost consciousness. 

Oz didn’t come to see him, in the cage they kept him locked in, only spoke to him once over an intercom. 

_ Happy birthday,  _ he had said.  _ Guess you’re legal, now. Ain’t that a peach, Martin? _

Martin hadn’t replied, hadn’t said a word to him. 

He wouldn’t say a thing until the day he broke down the doors of Blackwing with an assault rifle and a new family at his back, four brothers whom he could trust unconditionally. 

“I trusted you,” he said, as a dazed Osmund Priest stared up at him from where Martin had put him to the floor. “You ain’t my brother no more.” 

“I’ll always be your brother,” Priest had said, but there was no love in his words, and there was no love in Martin’s heart for him anymore. 

“Goodbye, Oz,” he said quietly, and left him lying on the concrete. He had other brothers to keep safe, to keep as far away from Osmund Priest as possible, and if he had to leave part of his soul behind to do so, he would. The other Rowdies felt his pain, knew that Priest had something to do with the tears that Martin shed after they had driven a long time in a stolen van in the dark, long after the sun had risen and the light had cut through the shadows that Blackwing had wrapped them in for so many years. 

The Rowdy 3 were his family now, and Martin would burn the world down for them. 

Even his own flesh and blood. 

 

—

 

When Gripps had given Martin his first tattoo, fresh out of Blackwing and ready to take on the whole damn world if they had to, his brothers hadn’t asked why he requested two words at his throat, out of sight but never out of mind. 

_ In control. _

He didn’t need to be in charge, even if his brothers looked to him for leadership, but he did need to be in control of what he was, of the abilities that came with being one of  _ Project Incubus. _

(Martin remembered the word  _ incubus _ from a high school vocabulary list, and he had never seen anyone laugh so hard when he had explained the meaning of their official Blackwing name to Cross. Nor had he seen anyone quite as disgusted as Vogel had been to learn of it.)

Amanda had asked about the tattoos, once, had traced the letters with too-cold fingers that he had drawn to his mouth and kissed gently, just to see the heat flood her face and a spark leap to her eyes. He had told her, later, once the sting of the memory had faded under the warmth of her touch, and she had vowed to him that she would never let anything or anyone break them apart, ever again. 

“This is forever,” she said, stretching up to kiss his forehead, then his cheeks, then his lips, and he smiled up at her, tasting the sweet, wild flavor that was all Drummer. “You and me and all of them. 

Martin couldn’t let what happened to his family happen to his  _ new _ family; this crazy, wild bunch of strangers brought together by an inexplicable will of the universe. He would keep them safe and out of Blackwing’s grasp, and he would never, ever,  _ ever _ let himself slip like he had again. 

It had been a close call with Friedkin — he had been so hungry, so  _ furious, _ to see the one who had dared to touch their Drummer and intend her harm — and for once Martin had been grateful to see Priest with his cursed gas machine. 

At least he hadn’t killed the boy, hadn’t made him like the monster he had made his brother. 

“Martin,” said Amanda, and he looked to his Drummer, looked to his supernova heartbeat, and she smiled gently at him. “Where’d you go just now?” 

“Ain’t going anywhere without you,” he said, and kissed her.  _ Not anymore. _


End file.
